Rodin and Literature 115

Why should people want to make of a sculptor
of genius what he could never be, a man of letters ?
Many serious thinkers have read his " Thoughts "
—his admirable " Thoughts " on art, on flowers, on
the sky and the atmosphere. The version the
public knows, which has passed through many
revisers' hands, may seem to possess some worth ;
indeed, it has the smoothness of something far
away, softened by the centuries. But it is no more
than a piece of cunning stage scenery, retouched
and propped up. I have before me an unpublished
fragment of those " Thoughts," scrawled in pencil
on the back of a letter from a model asking for
employment ; the letters are badly formed, the
words stumble and trip, the sentences are incom-
plete. I give a specimen here : I leave the spelling
as he wrote it :

Ces nuages frises blancs^ cette cr$me fotteftee.
Us sont dans le perspective anonyme quand its
passent au-dessus de vastes arbres . . . entre les
arbres on voit comme des terres de geographies
immenses sur les"deux decoupe. ^ La majeste des